AIVMFile files

Forum|Forum|8 years ago
May 2, 2017
2 replies
7558 views

Hi, have a problem with these files, they are generating more than 5k files, each one with 16MB, and consume all the disk space, more that 80GB, and later get virtual memory error on illustrator.

Why are these temporary files not being erased?

thanks

QDneal

Participant

These LuckyX-AIVMFileXXXXXXXXXX files that you find populating your file directories are related Adobe Illustrator's temporary files. You can delete them without it affecting anything important but if you have designated and are using a scratch disk, they will simply repopulate the next time you save, open a file or restart Illustrator.

They do take quite a chunk of file storage. Each file is about 16MB so in total, they take about 5-6GB of disk space. If this is your concern, I recommend changing your scratch disk to a drive other than your startup drive. You can do this by going into Edit>Preferences...>Plug-ins & Scratch Disks. By default, the Primary scratch disk is "Startup" which is your Local Drive and Secondary is "none". It should list all your drive choices by letter. Simply select something other than "Startup" from the dropdown list and you'll notice that in the base of that drive a new folder will be created called "AITEMP". This is now where your temp files will be saved.

They are NOT malware or ransomware .

Hope this helped anyone else wondering about this pesky waste of disk space.

Heenaaah

Known Participant

Hi, I found this helpful, my C drive has gained a lot of space back now. However, I want to know are these files harmful for the system and corrupt it? Is there a permanenet way to get rid of them?

QDneal

Participant

Perhaps someone more technical than myself could answer this. I can assure you they are not harmful in anyway. They have something to do with the way Adobe software, partiuclarly Photoshop, creates temporary memory via the scratch disk. Unfortunately the only way to prevent the files from being written would be to reverse engineer the software. As of this moment, there's now way to disable use of a scratch disk. I'll also point out that the size of these files seems to be related closely to the size of your document history which is what allows you to go backward or forward step by step. The best suggestion I can make is to have a 500GB - 1TB external hard drive connected to your computer. Note the letter of that drive and desinate that as your scratch disk. UN-check your primary hard drive (usually C:\) as a scratch disk. This will at least prevent these files from continuously filling up your OS hard drive. Simply deleting the files from you hard drive will not work as they will be re-written as soon as you start Photoshop again. I hope this helps!